Charles Brown, Assistant Professor of Physics and Chiara Mingarelli, Assistant Professor of Physics have received 2023-2024 Public Voices Fellowships hosted by the Women Faculty Forum (WFF). They are part of the 2023-2024 cohort which includes 20 faculty members from across the university.
The Public Voices Fellowship at Yale gives under-represented expert scholars - including women - the opportunity to work with top journalists from The OpEd Project. As a part of the program, fellows receive support in all areas of public thought leadership, including writing and placing op-ed pieces, conducting TV and radio interviews, and using social media. The fellowship is designed to assist scholars in increasing their influence as thought leaders whose ideas impact not only academia but also larger public debates.
From the WWF Cohort webpage:
Charles Brown
Dr. Charles D. Brown II is an experimental quantum physicist with expertise in the physics of quantum gasses and liquids. Dr. Brown is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at Yale University. His research interest is in the quantum mechanics of strongly interacting many-body systems. His current research focuses on exploring the physics of synthetic quasicrystals, which are made from atoms trapped in quasicrystals made of light. Outside of the laboratory, Dr. Brown is co-founder and co-director of BlackInPhysics, and co-lead organizer of #BlackinPhysics week, a week dedicated to celebrating the historical contributions of Black physicists and to painting a more complete picture of what physicists look like. On related topics, he has personally written – and overseen the commissioning of – several important essays, which have appeared in Physics Today, Physics World and Nature Physics magazines, among other prominent venues. Dr. Brown won the 2021-2022 UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Civic Engagement. He earned a B.S. with honors in physics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and a Ph.D. in physics at Yale University.
Chiara Mingarelli
I am a gravitational-wave astrophysicist, looking to understand how supermassive black holes in the centers of massive galaxies merge. I do this by predicting their nanohertz gravitational-wave signatures, which there is now evidence for in pulsar timing array experiments. With pulsar timing data, I look for both individual supermassive black holes in binary systems, and for the gravitational-wave background which should be generated by their cosmic merger history. I am an assistant professor at Yale University and a guest researcher at the Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) at the Flatiron Institute. Previously I was an assistant professor at University of Connecticut (2020-2023). Before joining the CCA I was a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellow at Caltech and at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. I completed my PhD in 2014 at the University of Birmingham (UK) with Alberto Vecchio.
This story is adapted from the Women Faculty Forum pages about the Public Voices Fellowship and the Public Voices Fellowship Cohort.